The Target Committee (Kindle Single)

by Paul Ham

  “Our hearts were heavy,” Compton would later write. “What a tragedy, that this power . . . must first be used for human destruction.”70

  In his memoirs, Truman ascribed to Oppenheimer, Compton, Lawrence and Fermi a critical role in his decision on how and where to use the bomb:

  It was their recommendation that the bomb be used against the enemy as soon as it could be done [and] that it should be used without specific warning . . . against a target that would clearly show its devastating strength. I had realized of course that an atomic bomb explosion would inflict damage and casualties beyond imagination . . . It was their conclusion that no technical demonstration they might propose, such as over a deserted island, would be likely to bring the war to an end. It had to be used against an enemy target.71

  Truman was deceiving himself, adroitly shifting and spreading responsibility for the weapons’ use. He failed to mention the fact that the Target Committee had already made the decision, over which the scientists had had little or no influence. The scientists had served a political role, no more, reinforcing a foregone conclusion, thus thwarting the protests of their “undesirable” academic colleagues.

  The Joint Chiefs Meet

  In early June 1945 the plan to invade Japan, codenamed Operation Downfall, occupied Washington’s top military minds. History’s largest seaborne invasion would, if it proceeded, realize General MacArthur’s conception of two huge successive thrusts: first, the amphibious assault on Kyushu, dubbed Operation Olympic, scheduled for November 1, 1945; then the massed attack on the Tokyo Plain – Operation Coronet – set for March 1, 1946.

  Truman had little regard for “Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five-Star MacArthur,” as he’d told friends during a sail down the Potomac, saying, “It is a great pity we have stuffed shirts like that in key positions.”72 Shortening the war and saving American lives, not soothing MacArthur’s considerable ego, preoccupied Truman at the time.

  So on Monday June 18, the president convened a critical meeting of the joint chiefs of staff to determine whether to go ahead with the planned invasion of Japan. Would it succeed? And at what cost in terms of casualties? The final decision rested with the president, as supreme commander, and not with the joint chiefs, the Pentagon or MacArthur (who expected to command Operation Downfall). A day earlier, Truman had asked in his diary, “Shall we invade or bomb and blockade?” Truman clearly favored the latter course, in the wake of the carnage of Okinawa.

  At 3.30 pm the masters of America’s military strategy entered the White House. Fleet Admiral Ernest King – clever, arrogant and “perhaps the most disliked Allied leader of World War II”73 – saw invasion only as a contingency plan to be followed if the naval blockade failed. General George Marshall – honorable, self-disciplined, incorruptible – advocated a massive, concentrated land invasion and had been exploring with Stimson a workable way of extracting a Japanese surrender. Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff, believed strategic bombing of civilians was “barbarism not worthy of a Christian man”74 and thought the naval blockade alone would defeat Japan. In this view, Leahy had the support of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the Pacific fleet.75 Lieutenant General Ira Eaker represented General Hap Arnold, the gruff, hard-driven chief of US Army Air Forces who shared LeMay’s faith in “area” or civilian bombing – despite its manifest failure in Germany – cracking Japanese morale as an alternative to invasion. In short, their preferred strategies were neatly aligned with their service backgrounds and egos.

  In attendance too were departmental chiefs Stimson (War) and James Forrestal (Navy) as well as John McCloy, Stimson’s assistant secretary.

  All were aware of S-1, code for the atomic bomb; all knew the test of the atomic bomb was scheduled for July 16; and all knew that if the test were successful, the bomb – or the threat of it – might hasten the end of the war and remove America’s reliance on Russia. None entered the meeting disposed to mention this on the record; the atomic elephant in the room remained a state secret, officially aired only in the most secure circumstances. The bomb’s absence from the minutes, however, did not mean it was not discussed.

  ***

  Truman called on Marshall, as the senior soldier, to begin. The general outlined the invasion plan that earmarked November 1, 1945 for the Kyushu landing (as MacArthur had proposed). The circumstances, he said, were similar to those that applied before D-day.

  By that date, he said, American air and sea power would have:

  • “cut or choked off entirely Japanese shipping south of Korea”

  • “smashed practically every industrial target worth hitting” and “huge areas in Jap cities”

  • rendered the Japanese Navy, “if any still exists,” completely powerless

  • “cut Jap reinforcement capabilities from the mainland to negligible proportions.”76

  Weather patterns and the helplessness of the enemy’s homeland defenses further recommended a November invasion, Marshall said. But “the decisive blow,” he added, might well be “the entry or threat of entry of Russia into the war” – that is, Russia’s invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, which would force Japan to capitulate.

  Marshall turned to the likely losses, which aroused intense discussion. The Pentagon had estimated that American casualties – dead, wounded and missing – during the first 30 days of a land invasion “should not exceed the price we have paid for Luzon” – a reference to the battle for the Philippines, which produced 31,000 American casualties, compared with 42,000 inside a month of the Normandy landings.

  Several caveats applied to this relatively low body count. The invasion of Kyushu would take longer than 90 days, and the figures did not include naval losses, which had been extremely heavy at Okinawa. In any case, Marshall insisted “it was wrong to give any estimate in number.” The meeting thus fixed on 31,000 combat deaths, implying total casualties (dead, wounded and missing) of about 100,000–120,000.

  On this basis, Marshall and King agreed that invasion was the “only course” available: Only ground troops could finish off the Japanese Empire and force an unconditional surrender, they told the meeting.

  There must be no delay, King warned: Winter would not wait. “We should do Kyushu now,” he urged (his sudden enthusiasm marking a departure from his earlier position advocating the invasion of Japanese-occupied China). “Once started, however,” King added, using words Truman dearly wanted to hear, “[the operation] can always be stopped, if desired.”

  A dissenting voice was Leahy, who, at Truman’s invitation, questioned the surprisingly small casualty estimates. He cited America’s 35 percent casualty rate in Okinawa. In what numbers were they likely to invade Japan, he asked. Marshall estimated that 766,700 US troops would be needed. They would face about eight Japanese divisions or, at most, 350,000 troops and, of course, a deeply hostile people.

  The dreadful numbers rattled silently around the room: That would leave around 270,000 Americans dead, wounded or missing, implying a body count of 60,000–80,000.

  King protested that Kyushu was very different from Okinawa, and raised the likely casualties to “somewhere between Luzon . . . and Okinawa” – or about 36,000 dead, wounded or missing. In this instance, King’s arithmetic was almost as dubious as his geography: Kyushu is a mountainous land riven with caves and hilly redoubts, rather like Okinawa.77

  So the invasion would be “another Okinawa closer to Japan,” Truman grimly asked. The chiefs nodded. And the Kyushu landing, the president wondered – was it “the best solution under the circumstances?” “It is,” the chiefs replied.

  Unconvinced, Truman asked for Stimson’s view, interrupting the war secretary, who had been regaling the meeting with his dubious ideas about a “large submerged class” of Japanese insurgents. Would not the invasion of Japan by white men have the effect of uniting the Japanese people, Truman asked. Stimson agreed: Yes, the Japanese would “fight and fight” if white men invaded their country.

&nbs
p; With Truman’s opposition to an invasion deepening, he examined another card in his hand: the forthcoming Potsdam Conference, and how to get from Russia “all the assistance in the war that was possible.”

  This jolted the joint chiefs, who were forced to confront the military reality of “unconditional surrender.” Hitherto, they had not fully digested the scenario of the Russians acting as their allies in a Japanese invasion. Yet Truman was publicly committed to getting the Russians into the Pacific War, at least at this stage. (After the successful test of the bomb he would adopt the opposite view, and try to keep them out.) Were the Russians needed at all, several chiefs wondered. Silence. King spoke: The Soviets were “not indispensable” and “we should not beg them to come in.” His view echoed the feelings in the room.

  Leahy then broke ranks and directly challenged the hardline insistence on “unconditional surrender,” which would see the Japanese forced to grovel and Hirohito tried as a war criminal. It would only make the Japanese fight harder, Leahy insisted. He did not think the imposition of an unconditional surrender “at all necessary.” Truman appeared to agree, at least in part, suggesting that the definition of “surrender” had not yet been fixed.78

  Clearly, for Truman, the invasion plan was fading rapidly from the list of alternatives – and this, critically, was at a time when the atomic bomb had not yet been tested. Why, he wondered, was an invasion necessary given the manifest defeat of Japan? Surely the collapse of the Japanese economy, the total US sea blockade and ongoing massive air raids had “already created the conditions in which invasion would probably be unnecessary,” as the historian Max Hastings has argued.79

  Indeed, Truman had convened the meeting precisely because he hoped to prevent “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to another.” If the invasion of Kyushu and later Honshu was the best of “all possible alternative plans,” demons of doubt lingered in the president’s mind.80 Truman reluctantly authorized the continued planning of the invasion of Japan, but he had lost faith in its usefulness, could not countenance the likely casualties, and would never approve its execution – regardless of whether the bomb worked.

  As the meeting drew to a close, and the joint chiefs gathered up their papers, Truman asked McCloy, thus far a quiet observer, for his opinion. A clever, thoughtful man, the assistant secretary of war was not afraid to speak his mind. Only the day before he had urged Truman to drop the phrase “unconditional surrender.”

  For months McCloy had been the “leading oarsman” in Washington opposing the policy:81 “I feel,” he noted in late May, “that Japan is struggling to find a way out of the horrible mess she has got herself into . . . I wonder whether we can’t accomplish everything we want to accomplish without the use of that term.”82

  He now found himself sitting among “joint chiefs of staff and security and presidents and secretaries of war,”83 contemplating the weapon nobody dared name.

  “Nobody leaves this room until he’s been heard from,” Truman said. McCloy glanced at Stimson, who nodded. McCloy’s words do not appear in the official minutes, but he reprised the discussion in his memoir, and others later verified his account:84 The bomb offered a “political solution,” McCloy said, that would avoid the need for invasion.85

  A hush ensued. McCloy continued: “We should tell the Japanese that we have the bomb and we would drop it unless they surrendered.”86 Naming S-1 “even in that select circle . . . was sort of a shock,” he would recall. “You didn’t mention the bomb out loud; it was like . . . mentioning Skull and Bones [an undergraduate secret society] in polite society at Yale; it just wasn’t done. Well, there was a sort of gasp at that.”

  McCloy persevered: “I think our moral position would be stronger if we gave them a specific warning of the bomb.”87

  The president seemed interested, and urged McCloy to take up the matter with Byrnes, who was about to be sworn in as secretary of state (in fact, Byrnes was effectively doing much of the job in advance of his official appointment). Later, McCloy did as instructed, and Byrnes swiftly killed the idea. As Truman knew, Byrnes firmly opposed any “deals” with Japan that might be considered “a weakness on our part,” as McCloy later wrote.88

  For the rest of his life, McCloy would regret the “missed opportunity” of June 18, insisting that the Japanese would have surrendered had America made it clear that Japan could retain its emperor and warned them of the bomb. Instead, the president had “succumbed to the so-called hardliners” at the state department, as McCloy wrote in a letter to presidential adviser Clark Clifford at 89 years of age.89

  ***

  In the following days, dramatically higher estimates of casualties further doomed the invasion plan. Nimitz, King and MacArthur all warned of a greater number of dead and missing than the estimate given at the meeting on June 18. Even MacArthur ratcheted up his modest estimate to 50,800 casualties in the first 30 days.90 No one could provide accurate projections, of course, and Truman never received a clear or unanimous calculation of likely losses, according to King.

  Soon after the war Truman claimed that Marshall had estimated total US battle casualties of a Japanese land invasion at 500,000. The press would send the figure soaring to one million American casualties. That figure has bedeviled sensible debate ever since.91

  The estimated casualty rates of a hypothetical Japanese invasion were ludicrously inflated after the war. Simple school arithmetic is enough to demonstrate this. The Allied invasion force, if it had gone ahead, was expected to total 760,000. In other words, Marshall was claiming after the war that America would have sustained battle casualties of at least 70 percent of the invasion force – an absurd body count, given that the invaders would have been attacking a demoralized, ill-equipped adversary in a land devastated by air raids and bereft of basic commodities.

  It is often argued that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved a million American lives. Those who today swear by this figure are in fact saying that the Japanese would have killed 250,000 more troops than were slated to take part in the invasion. By this reckoning, every American soldier would have died. Another way of looking at it is this: If one million were killed, total casualties for the first 30 days would have been around three to four million (as total casualties tend to be about three times the body count). If they were true, these figures would make a mockery of the US infantryman’s fighting ability.

  But of course, these figures are incredible. Indeed, it is fair to speculate that if Marshall had actually believed his postwar casualty estimates at the time of the June 1945 meeting of the joint chiefs, it is inconceivable that he would have supported a land invasion. The fact that he did, emphatically, support the invasion is the best argument against his postwar casualty estimates, which were plainly put forward to justify, post facto, the use of the atomic bomb.

  In short, the bomb did not “save” these hypothetical lists of dead and wounded Americans. It was never a case of “either the bomb or the invasion.” In early July, Operation Downfall lost the support of Truman and the joint chiefs not because the atomic bomb offered an alternative (it had not yet been tested), but because the invasion plan was seen as too costly (with estimates of the number of dead, wounded and missing calculated at 120,000–150,000) and ultimately unnecessary, given Japan’s military and economic defeat. The bomb was not a factor in the decision at the time – but it would become the factor in the decision after the war.

  ***

  On July 16, almost a month after the joint chiefs met, the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated at Alamogordo in the New Mexican desert. The news raced down the secret channels to the anointed few, delighting Truman and Churchill, then at the Potsdam Conference in Berlin in negotiations with Stalin.

  In late July the final target list was confirmed: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki. To Groves’ annoyance, Kyoto was not on it. A relieved Stimson received the list in Potsdam, via a cable from General Arnold. The four chosen cities were “believed to contain large
numbers of key Japanese industrialists and political figures” who had sought refuge from major destroyed cities, adding to the cities’ suitability as targets. The strikes would be visual (not radar-guided), to ensure accuracy. The bombardiers would require clear skies, and if weather favored one city over another, the crews would divert in mid-attack to the more visible target. Two plutonium bombs were expected to be available in August, one around the 6th and another on the 24th.92 Three more atomic weapons were scheduled to be available in September, and at least seven per month thereafter.

  The first bombs were ready earlier than Groves anticipated. On August 6, the B-29 Enola Gay, piloted by Tibbets and named after his mother, dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima, killing 78,000 people on the first day – including more than 8000 schoolchildren working in the city as forced labor. On August 9, the B-29 Bockscar dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing 35,000 within hours – including most of the city’s 12,500 Catholics, the largest Christian community in Japan at the time; as well as those working in the city’s education and medical facilities, most of which were situated near the hypocenter. Hundreds of thousands would die in coming years, from wounds, radiation sickness, cancers and related conditions. Virtually all were civilians.

  Contrary to popular consensus, the atomic bombs did not persuade Tokyo to surrender. After hearing of the “special weapons,” the small group of elderly men who then ran Japan resolved to fight on, to the last Japanese, if necessary, unless America met their sole remaining condition: the preservation of the life and dynasty of their beloved Emperor Hirohito. Washington duly met this condition, two days after the destruction of Nagasaki, in a cable sent on August 11 that granted the Japanese people the right to choose their postwar government. On August 14, Japan conditionally surrendered.